"We here are Accuracy International are dedicated to using state of the art virtual reality software to help us create and arm the next generation of AWP Whore."
Trick is, they are well aware and have likely structured the company to allow a simple simple collapse w/ minimal loss, after which MediaProtector will be reborn from the ashes
Well that seems perfectly normal to me. Don't you do that when you're caught doing something you're not? Why I had to collapse and reform the other day to get out of a reckless driving charge. The cop did seem pretty surprised, though. Hm.
The Rock Band drumming on "expert" probably has the MOST skill required of any of the instruments.
Ah, so it's the opposite of real life.
Now now, drummers, don't get mad, I have a lot of respect for you. My father is a drummer after all, and I wouldn't even be here if drummers were capable of following the "rhythm method".
Like the bit in Star Wars when Luke Skywalker almost asked Leia out and, well, they would have had kids together and everything OMG! And lucky that C3P0 was such a patsy and ruined it for them. It was almost incestuous!
Not that I've ever come across that in real life, but definitely brother-sister relationships are a no-no.
I know. I'm an only child -- as far as I know. So whenever I get shot down by a woman, I just remember the lesson of Star Wars, and figure that she was probably just my long lost sister so I'm better off anyway.
But is it re-playable? I finished SOFII in a few hours, but in the last 8 years or whatever, I have re-played it probably 20 times... (and far more in multiplayer) same goes for the original Half-Life...
Well, I think it's pretty replayable, but that's me. If you have replayed Ocarina of Time, or any other Zelda game, I think you would easily find this one replayable. On the other hand, it's not that hard to beat it 100% getting all the secrets and collectibles and what not the first time. So if that's what you like to do the 2nd time around, maybe not. On the other hand, if you just want to enjoy the dungeon crawls and boss fights and mini games without worrying about collectibles the second time, it should be good for you.
The first game was awesome. It was in a great many ways a better Zelda than Zelda, in particular its contemporary Wind Waker. The different game play elements were all well done, none of them tedious or annoying. The 'dungeons' were more involved and tightly integrated than Zelda's, seeming to be more of a real place than just a series of rooms with puzzles in them. The story was, for this type of game at least, very good. The only knock against the game I can make is that it's fairly short, but there's a hidden point of praise in there: They didn't decide to jack up the hour count excessively, just allowing it to be a shorter game where you were having fun the whole time, rather than a fun game most of the time, with a long boring part right before the finale.
So, here's hoping the second one is as good as the first. I just, uh, hope there fly-snorting isn't a major game play mechanic.
Exactly! And I don't know why people play FPSs when they can just go down to the Army recruiting station!
Pfft, I know why, cus I tried it. Those bastards make you wait way too long before they let you start shooting people, and once they do, they're pretty damn anal about team kills. Oh and on that note, they really don't appreciate it when you start bragging about how many frags you got.
Well, at least there's a random source picture of someone snowboarding...
No, no, that's a picture of the new optional controller, the snowy half-pipe add-on. It's going to be a lot more expensive than the balance board, though, so it's not going to come with the base game.
The problem with curvature is that it imples continuity (infinite divisibility), which leads to an infinite regress. Therefore curvature is an unacceptable concept in physic
So are you denying that space-time can be bent by mass/energy? Well guess what, you're provably wrong, because we've measured the curvature of space. You can call it "unacceptable" all you want. It exists. So, given a hypothesis that curvature can't exist, and a experiment that says it does, which must be wrong? That's right, the hypothesis. No matter how strongly you believe in it. Ask Michelson and Morley.
Oh, and give it up with this "infinite regress" BS. Infinite regress is a problem for formal proofs, nothing more. Godel already handled that, proving that there are true statements which cannot be formally proven. They can still be experimentally verified, and in physics that's what counts.
Besides, even accepting that the universe can't be continuous (QM suggests it is quantized), that says nothing about the overall shape of the universe. If the universe is quantized and there is no curvature, then you are simply moving in discreet quanta along a plane. What is so hard to grasp about moving in discreet quanta, but along a more complicated function? It's no different. Quantized curvature is no more impossible than quantized flatness.
And what if they are? The last I heard, neither Einstein nor modern physics is infallible.
Oh sure, that's entirely possible. One big problem in proving it, though, is the fact that these theories have undergone and passed extensive experimental verification. They make predictions, predictions we can verify in reality. While we haven't tested every aspect or prediction, we know that things like time dilation and space dilation do in fact exist, in the exact amounts predicted by Einstein to our limits of being able to measure it. Could further measurement show Einstein to be inaccurate, and another theory prove superior? Sure, but that theory would have to at least account for what we have measured of Relativity.
And that's where all these "alternative" theories fail. Because they are 1) founded in scientific ignorance and 2) founded entirely in the egotistical notion that you can "up-end" all of science and prove all the scientists (that call you a loony) wrong, they always and consistently fail to explain the results of these theories that have been well proven. Usually by ignoring them, because they don't understand them to begin with.
It is easier to kiss ass and safeguard one's career than it is to bravely step up to plate and tell the emperor that he's buck naked and stupid.
Pfft, how much "bravery" does it take to stand up and tell a spectacled geek that they are naked? What wrath will be visited upon you? No, it's easier to come up with some stupid idea pulled out of ones backside that "proves" all modern physics is wrong, than to actually prove that all modern physics is wrong by coming up with an experiment that contradicts it. And remember, you can't ignore those experiments that have already been done.
Oh, and a continuous universe and infinite regress are not significant problems. There is no reason the universe cannot be continuous. It just would make it harder for us to prove certain things about it. Big whoop, we got over that long ago. On the other hand, quantum mechanics suggests the universe may not be continuous. So there you go. Which emperor is naked again?
A long time ago, before chat rooms or blogs, a common internet medium was a program called "talk". The primary difference of modes today was that each "talker" got half the screen and just typed away. You could type something and then backspace it away but the person on the other end would see the entire exchange. So they knew both the early response and the second.
"^H" is representative of Control-H which in several terminal types is basically backspace. When people now type one thing followed by a series of "^H" they are simulating this early behavior of "talk" or even earlier and more mundane habit of hiding a hidden response or comment (cough, cough).
There are two more facts that will help people and machines trying to understand the funny:
1) The "talk" program would send the literal backspace key to the talk client you were communicating in order to erase the character off their screen. 2) Different terminals may be using different codes for backspace, such that it was possible that when someone tried to erase something they typed it would look to be properly deleted on their end, yet on the other end it would appear as a literal series of "^H"s, making both the original word and attempt to erase it obvious.
So an additional layer of the humor in the case of using "^H"s is that it is supposed to simulate the hidden comment, revealed unintentionally and unwittingly.
But, as you said, the lock doesn't require a bus lock. Please correct me if I'm wrong on this, it's been a few months since I've read that piece of code and I'm a little hazy on the exact details.
Ooh, don't know anything about that code actually. A cache flush is a lot heavier weight than a normal lock, if you're only accessing one cache line that is, but I could see it being a good idea in a number of situations in OSes. Interesting.
These operations may need no OS system call, may use no explicit semaphore or lock, but the memory bus has to be locked briefly -- especially to guarantee all CPUs seeing the same updated value, it has to do a write-through and cannot just update the values in cache local to the CPU. And when you have large number of CPU cores running, the memory bus becomes the bottleneck by itself.
That's not strictly true.
First, most lock operations do not require a full bus lock. All you have to do is to ensure atomicity of the load and store. Which effectively means you have to 1) acquire the cache line in the modified state (you're the only one who has it here), and 2) prevent system probes from invalidating the line before you can write to it by NACKing those probes until the LOCK is done. Practically this means the locked op has to be the oldest on that cpu before it can start, which ultimately delays its retirement, but not by as much as a full bus lock. Also it has minimal effect on the memory system. The LOCK does not fundamentally add any additional traffic.
Second, the way the value is propagated to other CPUs is the same as any other store. When the cache line is in the modified state, only one CPU can have a copy. All other CPUs that want it will send probes, and the CPU with the M copy will send its data to all the CPUs requesting it, either invalidating or changing to Shared its own copy depending on the types of requests, coherence protocol, etc. If nobody else wants it, and it is eventually evicted from the CPU cache, it will be written to memory. This is the same, LOCK or no.
Third, an explicit mutex requires at least two separate memory requests, possibly three: One to acquire the lock, and the other to modify the protected data. This is going to result in two cache misses for the other CPUs, one for the mutex and one for the data, which are both going to be in the modified state and thus only present in the cache of the cpu that held the mutex. In some consistency models, a final memory barrier is required to let go of the mutex to ensure all writes done inside the lock are seen (x86 not being one of them).
Fourth, with fine enough granularity, most mutexes are uncontested. This means the overhead of locking the mutex is really just that, overhead. Getting maximal granularity/concurrency with mutexes would mean having a separate mutex variable for every element of your data array. This is wasteful of memory and bandwidth. Building your assumptions of atomicity into the structure itself means you use the minimal amount of memory (and thus mem bw), and have the maximal amount of concurrency.
So basically, while it isn't necessarily "radical" (practical improvements often aren't), it is definitely more than bogus marketing. There's a lot more to it than that.
Well take my example of Digital Cameras. http://www.dpreview.com/ is much more informed and not biased at all and very professional.
Wow. You accuse CR of having a conflict of interest because they sell advertising -- which is completely false -- and then your chosen example of an unbiased reviewer is one that has no less than four large ads on the front page, including direct ads by companies whose products are being reviewed.
If you find their reviews useful to you, and more so than CR's reviews of the same products, more power to you. But Consumer Report's reputation for non-bias is extremely well established and well deserved. They are funded entirely by subscriptions, and not only do they not sell ads or take freebies from companies, they go out of their way to purchase off-the-shelf products incognito at retail to avoid cherry picking of samples.
Specialized knowledge is great and all, no doubt about it, but nobody beats CR in terms of avoiding conflicts of interest. That's what they bring to the table, and it's a great asset.
Because one is a general statement ("supports 700+ threads"), and the other is a statement about a specific hardware setup ("in production with 768 cores").
It was not meant to imply that the 768 processor system will use exactly 700 worker threads. It was meant to imply that the system breaks through the traditional scalability limits of 50-100 threads, thus the 700+.
Besides, after the buzz wears down, anyone doing these "exercises" will quickly discover there are no results to be had, and the balancing board will end up in the closet with the rest of the rubber bands, abdominizors, and exercises dvds.
The abdominizors and work out balls et al don't end up in the closet because they're ineffective in the sense that you mean. Used regularly, pretty much any of those As-Seen-On-TV exercise doohikies would improve fitness of your average couch potato. Sure the benefit/effort ratios are wildly exaggerated, but there are surely results to be had.
The reason they end up in the closet is because they were bought by/given to a person who doesn't have the motivation and discipline to exercise regularly just for the sake of exercising, and the device doesn't magically give them that motivation.
The problem is exercise is boring. If WiiFit makes it fun enough that someone will do it, then it will succeed where the Abdominator failed.
They're calling it a telltale, which from the description sounds more accurate than windsock, as a telltale is not hollow.
Well they're saying it's a 'tube', which to me implied a hollow sheath of material like a wind sock. Looking at the pictures, it looks like a tube handing from a string, but it's hard to tell if it's hollow or not.
Either way, it's an actual time-tested instrument, not a joke like the weather rock.
To the best of my ability to read, we just spent a few million dollars so that we could learn the direction the wind was blowing. At one point. On a rock. A rock very, very far away from here. Where no humans fly, boat, or do anything else which benefits in the slightest from wind directional data.
Except, you know, that whole "understanding the environment of Mars" which benefits quite a bit from knowing about the wind. Sure it's only one location. On the other hand, it will be the only measurement we've ever had and thus a substantial increase in knowledge. They could have spent more on more sophisticated devices, compromising the mass (and dollar) budget, if you really wanted to.
It's hard for me to imagine how you could approve of the overall $420 million project, yet disapprove of this simple, lightweight, and relatively cheap instrument. If you're expecting anything discovered by the Phoenix to have a direct impact on sailing, boating, or any other thing we do here on earth, well, it's possible it will happen eventually, but don't hold your breath. So is it the entire concept of investigating other planets in our solar system that bothers you? Or is it really just the unsophisticated wind indicator?
And they already had enough respect as a simple form of wind indicator. You may have seen one at an airport, for example. It's not a weather rock.
See, the point, or "joke" as it were, of the weather rock is that it can't actually tell you anything you wouldn't have already known due to your own senses. "If it's wet it's raining, white it's snowing, bouncing and there's an earthquake." But you could tell all those things without the rock... get it?
A wind sock isn't very sophisticated, but it tells us things that wouldn't have been as apparent without it.
Slashdot Mirror
Is that even possible?!?
I, er... *collapses*
"We here are Accuracy International are dedicated to using state of the art virtual reality software to help us create and arm the next generation of AWP Whore."
Trick is, they are well aware and have likely structured the company to allow a simple simple collapse w/ minimal loss, after which MediaProtector will be reborn from the ashes
Well that seems perfectly normal to me. Don't you do that when you're caught doing something you're not? Why I had to collapse and reform the other day to get out of a reckless driving charge. The cop did seem pretty surprised, though. Hm.
The Rock Band drumming on "expert" probably has the MOST skill required of any of the instruments.
Ah, so it's the opposite of real life.
Now now, drummers, don't get mad, I have a lot of respect for you. My father is a drummer after all, and I wouldn't even be here if drummers were capable of following the "rhythm method".
Amen to that.
Like the bit in Star Wars when Luke Skywalker almost asked Leia out and, well, they would have had kids together and everything OMG! And lucky that C3P0 was such a patsy and ruined it for them. It was almost incestuous!
Not that I've ever come across that in real life, but definitely brother-sister relationships are a no-no.
I know. I'm an only child -- as far as I know. So whenever I get shot down by a woman, I just remember the lesson of Star Wars, and figure that she was probably just my long lost sister so I'm better off anyway.
But is it re-playable? I finished SOFII in a few hours, but in the last 8 years or whatever, I have re-played it probably 20 times... (and far more in multiplayer) same goes for the original Half-Life...
Well, I think it's pretty replayable, but that's me. If you have replayed Ocarina of Time, or any other Zelda game, I think you would easily find this one replayable. On the other hand, it's not that hard to beat it 100% getting all the secrets and collectibles and what not the first time. So if that's what you like to do the 2nd time around, maybe not. On the other hand, if you just want to enjoy the dungeon crawls and boss fights and mini games without worrying about collectibles the second time, it should be good for you.
But damnit, what was the question?!
The first game was awesome. It was in a great many ways a better Zelda than Zelda, in particular its contemporary Wind Waker. The different game play elements were all well done, none of them tedious or annoying. The 'dungeons' were more involved and tightly integrated than Zelda's, seeming to be more of a real place than just a series of rooms with puzzles in them. The story was, for this type of game at least, very good. The only knock against the game I can make is that it's fairly short, but there's a hidden point of praise in there: They didn't decide to jack up the hour count excessively, just allowing it to be a shorter game where you were having fun the whole time, rather than a fun game most of the time, with a long boring part right before the finale.
So, here's hoping the second one is as good as the first. I just, uh, hope there fly-snorting isn't a major game play mechanic.
Exactly! And I don't know why people play FPSs when they can just go down to the Army recruiting station!
Pfft, I know why, cus I tried it. Those bastards make you wait way too long before they let you start shooting people, and once they do, they're pretty damn anal about team kills. Oh and on that note, they really don't appreciate it when you start bragging about how many frags you got.
Well, at least there's a random source picture of someone snowboarding...
No, no, that's a picture of the new optional controller, the snowy half-pipe add-on. It's going to be a lot more expensive than the balance board, though, so it's not going to come with the base game.
The problem with curvature is that it imples continuity (infinite divisibility), which leads to an infinite regress. Therefore curvature is an unacceptable concept in physic
So are you denying that space-time can be bent by mass/energy? Well guess what, you're provably wrong, because we've measured the curvature of space. You can call it "unacceptable" all you want. It exists. So, given a hypothesis that curvature can't exist, and a experiment that says it does, which must be wrong? That's right, the hypothesis. No matter how strongly you believe in it. Ask Michelson and Morley.
Oh, and give it up with this "infinite regress" BS. Infinite regress is a problem for formal proofs, nothing more. Godel already handled that, proving that there are true statements which cannot be formally proven. They can still be experimentally verified, and in physics that's what counts.
Besides, even accepting that the universe can't be continuous (QM suggests it is quantized), that says nothing about the overall shape of the universe. If the universe is quantized and there is no curvature, then you are simply moving in discreet quanta along a plane. What is so hard to grasp about moving in discreet quanta, but along a more complicated function? It's no different. Quantized curvature is no more impossible than quantized flatness.
And what if they are? The last I heard, neither Einstein nor modern physics is infallible.
Oh sure, that's entirely possible. One big problem in proving it, though, is the fact that these theories have undergone and passed extensive experimental verification. They make predictions, predictions we can verify in reality. While we haven't tested every aspect or prediction, we know that things like time dilation and space dilation do in fact exist, in the exact amounts predicted by Einstein to our limits of being able to measure it. Could further measurement show Einstein to be inaccurate, and another theory prove superior? Sure, but that theory would have to at least account for what we have measured of Relativity.
And that's where all these "alternative" theories fail. Because they are 1) founded in scientific ignorance and 2) founded entirely in the egotistical notion that you can "up-end" all of science and prove all the scientists (that call you a loony) wrong, they always and consistently fail to explain the results of these theories that have been well proven. Usually by ignoring them, because they don't understand them to begin with.
It is easier to kiss ass and safeguard one's career than it is to bravely step up to plate and tell the emperor that he's buck naked and stupid.
Pfft, how much "bravery" does it take to stand up and tell a spectacled geek that they are naked? What wrath will be visited upon you? No, it's easier to come up with some stupid idea pulled out of ones backside that "proves" all modern physics is wrong, than to actually prove that all modern physics is wrong by coming up with an experiment that contradicts it. And remember, you can't ignore those experiments that have already been done.
Oh, and a continuous universe and infinite regress are not significant problems. There is no reason the universe cannot be continuous. It just would make it harder for us to prove certain things about it. Big whoop, we got over that long ago. On the other hand, quantum mechanics suggests the universe may not be continuous. So there you go. Which emperor is naked again?
The answer is very simple: because the Apollo moon landing equipment is in a warehouse in Area 51, along with the "moon" set, not on Mars.
;)
Fixed that for you!
Even without a telescope you can look up and see that the thing is red. But a) even that was disputed here last time
Idiots will dispute anything. Don't let them bother you.
A long time ago, before chat rooms or blogs, a common internet medium was a program called "talk". The primary difference of modes today was that each "talker" got half the screen and just typed away. You could type something and then backspace it away but the person on the other end would see the entire exchange. So they knew both the early response and the second.
"^H" is representative of Control-H which in several terminal types is basically backspace. When people now type one thing followed by a series of "^H" they are simulating this early behavior of "talk" or even earlier and more mundane habit of hiding a hidden response or comment (cough, cough).
There are two more facts that will help people and machines trying to understand the funny:
1) The "talk" program would send the literal backspace key to the talk client you were communicating in order to erase the character off their screen.
2) Different terminals may be using different codes for backspace, such that it was possible that when someone tried to erase something they typed it would look to be properly deleted on their end, yet on the other end it would appear as a literal series of "^H"s, making both the original word and attempt to erase it obvious.
So an additional layer of the humor in the case of using "^H"s is that it is supposed to simulate the hidden comment, revealed unintentionally and unwittingly.
But, as you said, the lock doesn't require a bus lock. Please correct me if I'm wrong on this, it's been a few months since I've read that piece of code and I'm a little hazy on the exact details.
Ooh, don't know anything about that code actually. A cache flush is a lot heavier weight than a normal lock, if you're only accessing one cache line that is, but I could see it being a good idea in a number of situations in OSes. Interesting.
These operations may need no OS system call, may use no explicit semaphore or lock, but the memory bus has to be locked briefly -- especially to guarantee all CPUs seeing the same updated value, it has to do a write-through and cannot just update the values in cache local to the CPU. And when you have large number of CPU cores running, the memory bus becomes the bottleneck by itself.
That's not strictly true.
First, most lock operations do not require a full bus lock. All you have to do is to ensure atomicity of the load and store. Which effectively means you have to 1) acquire the cache line in the modified state (you're the only one who has it here), and 2) prevent system probes from invalidating the line before you can write to it by NACKing those probes until the LOCK is done. Practically this means the locked op has to be the oldest on that cpu before it can start, which ultimately delays its retirement, but not by as much as a full bus lock. Also it has minimal effect on the memory system. The LOCK does not fundamentally add any additional traffic.
Second, the way the value is propagated to other CPUs is the same as any other store. When the cache line is in the modified state, only one CPU can have a copy. All other CPUs that want it will send probes, and the CPU with the M copy will send its data to all the CPUs requesting it, either invalidating or changing to Shared its own copy depending on the types of requests, coherence protocol, etc. If nobody else wants it, and it is eventually evicted from the CPU cache, it will be written to memory. This is the same, LOCK or no.
Third, an explicit mutex requires at least two separate memory requests, possibly three: One to acquire the lock, and the other to modify the protected data. This is going to result in two cache misses for the other CPUs, one for the mutex and one for the data, which are both going to be in the modified state and thus only present in the cache of the cpu that held the mutex. In some consistency models, a final memory barrier is required to let go of the mutex to ensure all writes done inside the lock are seen (x86 not being one of them).
Fourth, with fine enough granularity, most mutexes are uncontested. This means the overhead of locking the mutex is really just that, overhead. Getting maximal granularity/concurrency with mutexes would mean having a separate mutex variable for every element of your data array. This is wasteful of memory and bandwidth. Building your assumptions of atomicity into the structure itself means you use the minimal amount of memory (and thus mem bw), and have the maximal amount of concurrency.
So basically, while it isn't necessarily "radical" (practical improvements often aren't), it is definitely more than bogus marketing. There's a lot more to it than that.
Well take my example of Digital Cameras. http://www.dpreview.com/ is much more informed and not biased at all and very professional.
Wow. You accuse CR of having a conflict of interest because they sell advertising -- which is completely false -- and then your chosen example of an unbiased reviewer is one that has no less than four large ads on the front page, including direct ads by companies whose products are being reviewed.
If you find their reviews useful to you, and more so than CR's reviews of the same products, more power to you. But Consumer Report's reputation for non-bias is extremely well established and well deserved. They are funded entirely by subscriptions, and not only do they not sell ads or take freebies from companies, they go out of their way to purchase off-the-shelf products incognito at retail to avoid cherry picking of samples.
Specialized knowledge is great and all, no doubt about it, but nobody beats CR in terms of avoiding conflicts of interest. That's what they bring to the table, and it's a great asset.
Maybe they're playing Wii Sports Bowling with the 16lb Bowling Ball attachment?
Because one is a general statement ("supports 700+ threads"), and the other is a statement about a specific hardware setup ("in production with 768 cores").
It was not meant to imply that the 768 processor system will use exactly 700 worker threads. It was meant to imply that the system breaks through the traditional scalability limits of 50-100 threads, thus the 700+.
Besides, after the buzz wears down, anyone doing these "exercises" will quickly discover there are no results to be had, and the balancing board will end up in the closet with the rest of the rubber bands, abdominizors, and exercises dvds.
The abdominizors and work out balls et al don't end up in the closet because they're ineffective in the sense that you mean. Used regularly, pretty much any of those As-Seen-On-TV exercise doohikies would improve fitness of your average couch potato. Sure the benefit/effort ratios are wildly exaggerated, but there are surely results to be had.
The reason they end up in the closet is because they were bought by/given to a person who doesn't have the motivation and discipline to exercise regularly just for the sake of exercising, and the device doesn't magically give them that motivation.
The problem is exercise is boring. If WiiFit makes it fun enough that someone will do it, then it will succeed where the Abdominator failed.
They're calling it a telltale, which from the description sounds more accurate than windsock, as a telltale is not hollow.
Well they're saying it's a 'tube', which to me implied a hollow sheath of material like a wind sock. Looking at the pictures, it looks like a tube handing from a string, but it's hard to tell if it's hollow or not.
Either way, it's an actual time-tested instrument, not a joke like the weather rock.
To the best of my ability to read, we just spent a few million dollars so that we could learn the direction the wind was blowing. At one point. On a rock. A rock very, very far away from here. Where no humans fly, boat, or do anything else which benefits in the slightest from wind directional data.
Except, you know, that whole "understanding the environment of Mars" which benefits quite a bit from knowing about the wind. Sure it's only one location. On the other hand, it will be the only measurement we've ever had and thus a substantial increase in knowledge. They could have spent more on more sophisticated devices, compromising the mass (and dollar) budget, if you really wanted to.
It's hard for me to imagine how you could approve of the overall $420 million project, yet disapprove of this simple, lightweight, and relatively cheap instrument. If you're expecting anything discovered by the Phoenix to have a direct impact on sailing, boating, or any other thing we do here on earth, well, it's possible it will happen eventually, but don't hold your breath. So is it the entire concept of investigating other planets in our solar system that bothers you? Or is it really just the unsophisticated wind indicator?
And they already had enough respect as a simple form of wind indicator. You may have seen one at an airport, for example. It's not a weather rock.
See, the point, or "joke" as it were, of the weather rock is that it can't actually tell you anything you wouldn't have already known due to your own senses. "If it's wet it's raining, white it's snowing, bouncing and there's an earthquake." But you could tell all those things without the rock... get it?
A wind sock isn't very sophisticated, but it tells us things that wouldn't have been as apparent without it.